CRWR

This course introduces fundamental ideas about poetic form and approaches to poetic writing through close reading and discussion of poetry (modern and contemporary but not exclusively). We will consider poetic elements from the ground-up—reading closely for sound, image, syntax, and meaning—in order to enliven those elements in student writing. Likewise, we will consider how poems appear at a cross-roads between history and experience (the past and present) in order to inspire students to write not only about themselves but about real and imagined social, cultural, historical, and intellectual locations and horizons. We will do so in conversation with our peers by way of regular workshops, in which students will give feedback to one another’s works, learning thus how to read critically while generously, and how to respond collegially while also constructively.  At the end of the quarter students will revise drafts based on the class writing exercises and workshop conversations, to produce a portfolio prefaced by a critical reflection. Students who are interested in the multidisciplinary and multimedial intersections of poetry are especially encouraged to apply.

Scenes are often considered the building blocks of narrative story-telling. In this course, we’ll examine short fiction through the lens of scene, starting from the basics: What are scenes, how do they work, and what should they accomplish in a story? We’ll consider the scene’s relationship with context, tension, subtext, narrative arc, and other story elements. Together we’ll examine how authors like Bret Anthony Johnston, Rebecca Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri use scenes to great effect, with a particular focus on setting, dialogue, action, and detail. In addition to readings, students will complete several short writing exercises and one longer story, which you will workshop and substantially revise. You will also engage with the work of your peers, delivering thoughtful, encouraging, constructive critiques.

Understanding Narrative Points of View: Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. We will spend more than a third of our time in this class reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary, by writers like James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Discussion will be lively—passionate opinions and enthusiasm are welcome—but most of our focus will be on the choices writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, including: point of view, tone, direct and summary dialog, setting, and use of time. In-class exercises will further hone your understanding of specific techniques, fire your creativity and get you writing. We will then move to writing workshop, where you will have the opportunity to present your work to the group. Critique will be respectful and productive, with emphasis on clarity and precision. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and completed at least one story, which will be revised and handed in as a final portfolio.

Basics of Narrative Design:

Describing fiction writing as an “art” is perhaps a misnomer. Depending on who’s describing it, the process of creating a narrative is more like driving in the dark, or like woodworking, or gardening. It’s like raising a half-formed, misbehaved child and then trying to reason with it. The metaphors abound, but the techniques for creating effective fictional prose are often quite consistent. This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as point of view and plot arrangement to more highly focused lessons on scene design, dialog, and word choice. Throughout the term, the writing process will be broken down into stages where written work will focus on discrete story parts such as first pages, character introductions, and dialog-driven scenes before students are asked to compose full-length narratives. Along the way, students will chart their processes of conceptualizing, drafting, and revising their narratives. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students’ full stories.

Exploration of traditional nonfiction genres including literary journalism, memoir, and genre-writing. In a workshop environment, writers will develop working familiarity with basic aspects of craft in reportage and narrative. An added focus to the course is the exploration of “American space” and memory, particularly through autobiographical writing by American women (including work by Joan Didion, Margo Jefferson, Vivian Gornick, and MFK Fisher).

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30am-12:20pm

There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless.” There is only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.~~Arundhati Roy 

Invasion and occupation, waves of nomads and immigrants, the African slave trade, the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the Trail of Tears, the Dust Bowl, and the “southern border,” our American story contains multitudes, united in motion. Wanderers and drifters, exiles and refugees, we are on the run and in the mix, our collective experience one of forced migration as well as voluntary uprooting—we’re at once victims and agents, objects and subjects. Oral History, “the poetry of the everyday,” the literature of the street, is perfectly poised to open a unique window onto our migration stories, offering a narrative space where an interviewer, listening with empathy and identification, and a story-teller, seizing an occasion to perform an account of events and experiences, co-create a relationship and reveal a universe of meaning-making. Seeking authenticity, oral historians become attuned to contradiction, tension, disagreements, silences, inconsistencies, ambiguities, paradoxes, uncertainties, and every other kind of human muddle; we dive head-first into the wide, wild world of human experience and human meaning-making, offering an important antidote to propaganda, dogma, imposition and stereotype. We look for what happened, what people say happened, and the webs of significance people construct to make sense of what happened. In this seminar we will study the theory and practice of Oral History, and we will create original oral accounts of migration from our own families as well as from a much wider range of Chicago communities. 

Day/Time: Monday, 1:30-4:20pm

This course invites readers to reconsider Chicago as collage constructed through literary, journeyed, and virtual navigation.  We’ll examine work by writers and artists including Claude Dangerfield, Thomas Dyja, Eve Ewing, Bradley Garrett, Aleksandar Hemon, Richard Nickel, Mike Shea, and Chris Ware.  At what points does Chicago’s necropolis “peek out?”  Versus Walt Whitman, how does the artist’s eye retain defining power in the twenty-first century?  Is there such a thing as a “Chicago flâneuse or flâneur?”  In exploration of these questions, participants will develop their own individual and collaborative creative responses to “the world’s second most closely observed city.” 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50pm

Whether a memoir operates in the past or present tense, its narrator must reckon with some kind of unfinished business. While memory is the raw material of an autobiographical story, the drama exists inside the act of remembering, of reckoning with the “why” or “how” a narrator’s previous character or worldview has been transformed. In this class, we will study the structural, tonal, and representational possibilities of the "privileged perspective”: the vantage point from which a narrator writes across time and emotional distance from an experience, usually with the goal of resolution, revelation, or the conveyance of something that can only be approximated. We will close-read a number of contemporary memoirists that teach us how the privileged perspective works to drive forward a narrator’s agenda while upholding the reader’s stake in a story, exploring a multitude of interpretations through student-led presentations. Authors may include Jean-Dominique Bauby, Vladimir Nabokov, Vivian Gornick, Hisham Matar, Darin Strauss, and Joan Didion. In addition to one group presentation, students will be expected to track and analyze the functions of the privileged perspective via critical reading reports and technical writing prompts.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:30-3:20pm

In this writing workshop, students will go through all the stages of composing a narrative nonfiction feature story. After generating a few ideas that seem original, surprising in their approach, and appropriate in scope, we will write and re-write pitches, learning how to highlight the potential story in these ideas. After the class agrees to “assign” one of these features, each student will report, research and write a draft. The features will be workshopped in class, and students will go through an editorial process, polishing their stories through drafts and experimenting with style and form for a final assignment. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, ethics and craft of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to writers/reporters about their process. In the end, we should be able to put together a publication that contains all of these feature stories.

Day/Time: Friday, 1:30-4:20pm

Like so many essential and life-sustaining processes—relationship maintenance, money management, digestion—revision is something we often talk about without “really” talking about it (to use the words of writer Matthew Salesses). Yet by refusing (or failing) to “really” talk about revision, writers deny themselves the opportunity to actively engage with the potentialities of their work: the different shapes, forms, and shifts it might take. In this class, we will demystify the revision process by analyzing the works of writers—such as Anna Kavan, Edwidge Danticat, and Suzanne Scanlon—who have pursued radical revisions to their projects, including expansions (short stories developed into novels), compressions (longer works condensed into shorter pieces), point of view changes, and dramatic stylistic transformations. With a combination of creative exercises and workshops, we will also work toward our own radical revisions.

Day/Time: Friday, 1:30pm-4:20pm